The Jandek wait

My feet were tired. My back hurt. I decided it was better not to risk getting shut out of the Jandek show by cutting it close, so I took a load off at the church where he was to play. At 7 p.m. It wasn’t yet 4 when I arrived. No big shock, I was the first there, and heard muffled soundchecking.

After some time passed, a friendly guy named Jack kept me company. He’d seen Jandek in Portland. He split for a few and returned. Another cluster of folks showed, helping me feel less like a twit for arriving so early.

Things do to while standing in line (alone) waiting for Jandek:

1. Count band names in the SXSW directory that can’t be printed in the Chronicle. I came up with 10. Two of them featured four-letter words prefaced by “Holy.” One added an exclamation point.

2. Count band names that are puns. I found eight before growing bored with that pursuit somewhere in the N’s. Beast of Bourbon was my least favorite.

3. Play Miss Pac Man sampler on the cell phone.

4. Talk to Jack. (At this point, I was no longer alone.)

5. Look at cell phone pictures of my kid.

The doors opened and the venue gradually filled to capacity. It’s probably rude to hold a dead guy to a quote he served up more than a decade ago, but the Kurt Cobain comment about Jandek not being pretentious, but people who listen to him are rang false. The audience was split between 50somethings who have been mail-ordering his stuff for years and 20somethings who appreciate the mystique and the performance art aspect of what he does. Or who he is. And my early arrival colleagues were friendly and lovely.

Anyway, Jandek was fairly prompt, played for an hour. Whisper thin and decked out in black (hat, shirt, pants, shoes, guitar), he worked through six pieces that sounded like deconstructed mountain music run through monster amps. The entire set was new — or new to me — but the songs fit with the whole dark solitary man nature of his catalog. “The time of reckoning is here,” he warbled on the second. Gulp.

Mark C. Austin : For the Chronicle

The mysterious Jandek makes a public appearance.

“I’ll just keep going to the end of my time,” went the fifth tune, one of many passages that rang with Beckett-ish despair and endurance.

The instrumentation — including Lake Jackson’s Shawn David McMillen on harmonium — was thunderous, droning and loud. A fine backdrop for Jandek’s spidery guitar lines and hollered lyrics.

For all tastes? Not even close. But there’s some untainted allure to the music. Sure, the mystique — which has been impressively maintained for almost 30 years — doesn’t hurt either. But those who like the old made new would likely have shown up to this show without it.